Fake It Till You Make It: lip-service and deprogramming
The desperate, newly sober White Flaggers are always encouraged to invoke and pay empty lip-service to slogans they don’t yet understand or believe—e.g. ‘Easy Does It!’ and ‘Turn It Over!’ and ‘One Day At a Time!’ It’s called ‘Fake It Till You Make It,’ itself an oft-invoked slogan.
Context
The program's answer to the charge that it's a brainwashing cult: yes, sort of, but the brain in question is already occupied. Belief is not a prerequisite — you say the slogans before you mean them, "until you start to believe it" — because sincerity is treated as an outcome of practice, not its precondition. And Gately reframes the cult worry directly: if the Disease's Spider has already colonized the mind, then AA is less a washing than a "deprogramming," undoing a possession rather than installing one. The candor is the point; the theme never pretends the surrender isn't a kind of reconditioning.